Unless you’re simply tapping the ball into the hole, each shot you take with a club involves knocking the ball into the air.
The angle at which the ball flies through the air is important for determining how far it goes. If the angle is high, the ball doesn’t travel far horizontally…
…to begin with, as you lower the angle at which the ball leaves the ground, the further it goes…
However, as this launch angle gets closer and closer to horizontal, the pattern reverses. The ball doesn’t spend enough time in the air to make the most of the energy you put into the shot, and the distance travelled drops off…
Ignoring any other factors involved, the longest distance is achieved by a launch angle of 45°. Distance falls off as you move away from that angle in either direction (a steeper launch or a flatter launch).
This interplay between launch angle and distance plays an important role in golf. You can see how you could control the distance you hit the golf ball by simply varying the launch angle of the ball, rather than varying the strength of the shot.
That might seem a bit tricky - varying the launch angle instead of just hitting the ball less hard. But what if each club in your bag produced a different launch angle with the same swing? That way you could use the same swing, shot after shot, and vary the distance the ball travels by just picking a different club.
This is where loft comes in. Each club does indeed produce a different launch angle, because each club has a different loft.
Loft is the angle of the face of the club when compared to vertical (see the diagram below).
A clubface with a loft of 0 degrees would be perpendicular to the ground, a clubface with a loft of 89 degrees would be almost parallel to the ground…
All things being equal, the greater the loft of the club, the higher the trajectory of the ball it hits. So as we stated, if you were to swing the same way each time, then you could control how far the ball goes by switching between clubs of different lofts.
Imagine you’re trying to hit the golf ball 120 yards and then 60 yards. You could take one club and hit the ball twice with it, varying your swing speed according to how hard you need to hit the ball.
Or you could keep your swing pretty much constant and change your club (i.e. loft) to get the distance variation you need.
Matching your swing to the distance is much harder than keeping the same swing and matching club loft to distance.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that, as we’ll see later.
Driver lofts
Drivers are the club designed to hit the ball as far as possible. Based on what we learnt above, it would seem sensible for drivers to have a loft of 45°. But in practice they have lofts of 7° to 16°. Yikes!
It’s not just launch angle that determines ball flight. One key factor, for example, is the way the ball spins after you hit it.
When you hit the ball with your club, you impart backspin onto that ball - the greater the club loft, the greater the backspin. This backspin lifts the ball, too. So the ball will travel at a (much) higher angle than the actual loft would indicate.
So the optimum angle of flight when you’re looking to hit the ball as far as you can turns out to come from a loft that’s considerably less than 45°.
Until not so long ago, most drivers had a loft of between 7° and 10°. That appeared to give the best ball trajectory and thus distance.
Things are slightly different now. Changes to clubhead design, for example, mean that drivers impart less backspin on the ball, and thus less lift. To compensate for this, driver loft has to be higher to reach that optimal trajectory.
Also, tests have shown that the optimal loft for distance also depends on the speed with which you hit the ball. The slower the swing, the higher the optimal loft. As a result, driver loft has increased. Now many golfers have driver lofts of anything up to 16°.
There are other factors in play, too. Consider, for example, that if you hit the ball just before the clubhead reaches the lowest point of the swing, then the clubface is angled more toward the ground than it would otherwise be. So the “real” loft of the club at impact is less than its “formal” loft.
And vice versa - if you actually hit the ball as the club is coming up again at the end of your swing, then “real” loft is higher than the “formal” loft.
So when it comes to choosing your driver loft, there is no substitute for playing around with different lofts on different drivers to see which gives you the best results for your particular style of play and swing.
Woods and irons
The rest of the golf clubs in your bag are suited to hitting the ball progressively smaller distances. So the lofts of these clubs are higher than driver lofts, as you’d expect.
Fairway woods, for example, might have lofts going as high as 30+°. Irons and wedges might have lofts that go up to 60+°.
The important thing to know is that the jumps in loft between the clubs are equivalent to jumps in the distance achieved by each club, were they to be hit the same way.
This is the practical illustration of that principle we talked about earlier. If you took out a set of eight different irons and hit the same ball the same way with each one, you’d find the ball travels progressively less distance as the loft of each club you use rises.
This exercise basically produces a table of figures where each club is associated with a particular distance. When you’re on the course and know how far you want to hit the ball, you can then pick the club best suited to that distance.
I said earlier that it wasn’t quite that simple. Here’s why.
Since you don’t have an infinite number of clubs and thus lofts, the distance you need to move the ball and the distance “associated” with a particular club won’t match perfectly. So you will have to modify your swing speed, for example, to account for that.
Equally, loft is about height as well as distance. If you’re behind an obstacle or elevation, the club that gives you the right distance may not have the right loft to get you over (or under) the obstacle or hump.
You can see why choosing which club to use and how to hit it is one of golf’s great challenges!
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